DS got diagnosed in his gap year. When we went for the offer holders' day at his college we spoke to one of the college administrators about how he would go about getting permission to type in exams as he had at A levels because of his slow and illegible handwriting. They said he would need a diagnosis of dysgraphia but that it was hard to get without a childhood diagnosis of dyspraxia. I approached a couple of ed psychs in our county and one said the same thing about problems with diagnosing it in adulthood, and the other said she had dealt with lots of new uni students, so we went with her.
She was expensive but very thorough. She took a full history from us, encompassing all sorts of childhood issues, and several reports and initial quizzes from DS. We were all amazed at how many of the dyspraxia indications fitted him exactly, including many things we had just thought of as personality quirks.
We had expected the dyspraxia diagnosis to be borderline, and just hoped it was enough to allow him to type in exams, but he came back as strongly dyspraxic, with it affecting all sorts of areas such as reading processing speed and working memory. He has always said he reads slowly, but since he has done so well at school we always assumed he was exaggerating. (He got 3 A*s at A level in essay-based subjects, with top marks in more than half the papers; managed the gruelling Oxford entrance process; secured a deferred place - which they only give very rarely, etc, etc).
We started the process of engaging with student support in the spring, which was a good thing as they have still not completed his Student Support Plan. It would have been possible for him to have been assessed much less expensively once at uni but given the time scales I don't think they would have completed the process until near the end of the first year.
Having had the diagnosis has been very helpful for DS in lots of ways - he felt it gave him permission to read in audio format rather than conventionally, and he managed to read all of the 20-odd books he was set in mid-August. A lot of his anxiety this first week has been about getting text to speech software set up and working with the uni library systems, which he has finally managed to do.
In some ways it would have been helpful for him and us if he had had this diagnosis much earlier, but I have mixed feelings about that. He has clearly found all sorts of work-arounds, both unconsciously and through re-wiring of brain pathways that he might not have done if he had had this 'label' earlier. He has fantastic auditory processing speeds and memory - he listens to audio texts speeded up and can remember huge chunks of them. We taught him to touch type when he was six and he was allowed to type most of his homework through secondary school, which removed a lot of frustrations he would otherwise have had. I'm pretty sure that he would not have applied to Oxford if he had known about the dyspraxia, as he would have assumed he could not keep up with the workload. I'm very glad he did, as the tutorial approach and the pastoral support will be ideal for him. I'm astounded at how much more he is socialising already compared to at his huge sixth form college.
@Decorhate: yes, the interaction of personality and other factors do seem to mask a lot of these sorts of conditions. When DS was little they used the term 'twice exceptional' - not sure if they still do - to describe 'gifted' children who had other conditions where the two things masked each other and confused diagnoses. I imagine a lot of our DC fall into this category. It certainly seems to be the case that huge numbers of students at all unis are diagnosed with something, many of whom had not been spotted before.